Many businesses depend on internal support groups to provide assistance to employees in numerous disciplines including finance, transport, information technology (IT), and human resources. According to traditional systems, support groups may utilize different approaches such as help desks in which an employee can call into a designated number in order to obtain assistance from a member of a support team. Businesses are also incorporating group chat solutions that may combine the asynchronous aspects of email and real-time aspects of instant messaging to make it easier to conduct ongoing, cross-functional team discussions about business-critical topics between a support group member and other employees.
As a result, support groups assist businesses to broaden information awareness, reduce information overload, reduce interruptions, securely connect teams to external communities, and enhance and retain organizational knowledge. For example, an international bank with operations throughout the world may need a support tool to facilitate text-based communication throughout its global financial markets network. Conventional instant messaging may not provide the security and archiving capabilities required by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). As an alternative approach, the international bank may utilize a persistent chat solution in which chat communications channels keep traders up-to-date. The channels are typically similar to chat rooms that are organized around products, such as credit, foreign exchange, emerging markets, or government bonds. Topic-based, persistent group channels may allow distributed, virtual teams to maintain an ongoing dialogue about business-critical topics as well as to broaden information awareness.
However, an employee may experience a hectic environment during a business day with a lot of things on the employee's computer display that may span multiple chat channels, thus often resulting in multitasking for the employee.